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The quadrumvirate running Sir Keir Starmer QC, Claire Ainsley, Deborah Mattinson, Lisa Nandy and Rachel Reeves all have a vested interest in Labour sticking with the Red Wall First strategy until after the next General Election.
They are certainly not going to let Starmer if he ever summoned up the courage go to that café in Leigh with Lisa Nandy and lay it out before the white folks there.
Do you want better staffed NHS cancer services or fewer foreigners in the country?
Fewer foreigners means more people suffering and dying from cancer.
Ainsley and Mattinson have staked their reputations, book sales and future earnings on the Red Wall First strategy.
Nandy has a book coming out soon on the left behind, yes, another one, by someone without personal insight, but plenty of access to lots of older people, happy to reminisce about the good old days and that the only proper apprenticeship is one lasting four years with at least one of the years devoted to learning one end of a broom from the other.
Nandy and Reeves both have their eye on the top job in their party as, of course, do the men on the other side of the Despatch Box whom they shadow.
A chap with a decent Emotional Intelligence Quotient might have an inkling that he was being manipulated by his own advisers.
Did they advise him on what to do to not wrest the crown of the party of business away from the Conservatives after Johnson made plain his two word business strategy?
Starmer spent 2020 not calling on the Government to put in place measures to mitigate at least some of the downsides of Brexit.
Starmer barely murmured when Johnson declined to extend the transition period.
Labour was too gun shy even to speak up for the Brexit agreement to include an implementation period, an extension to the transition period by another name.
And the pièce de résistance, Starmer, after endorsing Johnson’s Hard Brexit deal said at the end of 2020 that he wanted to spend 2021, talking about the NHS, jobs, the economy and meaningful manual labour, but not in the context of lost jobs and contracts, repossessions, business failures, lives imperilled … courtesy of Hard Brexit.
He also said that Hard Brexit would not be much of an issue for him during 2021 and probably not even a topic for Labour at the next General Election.
Labour is, of course, now styling itself the party for business even after saying it will be a Hard Brexit under the next Labour Government.
When, not if the Red Wall First strategy fails then Starmer will be the ideal scapegoat for its failing and, conveniently for its promoters, Labour leaders now prefer to resign and leave office after a General Election defeat rather than remain and learn from the lessons of failure.
The quadrumvirate might well try to claim that their plan itself was not at fault, but that the man whom they advised, the leader charged with its execution failed in his task, maybe was never really even up to see it through from the outset, but he did appoint them his advisers and Shadow Ministers.
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